It is quite an experience
discovering Stuart Christie’s “Spanish” background. This Scottish lad, barely
18 years old, knowing nothing of Spain and without speaking a word of Spanish,
hoisted a rucksack full of explosives on to his back, strapped packets of
plastic explosive to his body using bandages and secreted the detonators,
wrapped in cotton-wool, in the lining of his jacket and headed off to Spain to
put paid to the infamy of a populace terrorised by a bloodthirsty dictator and
his sinister cabal of generals, bishops, latifundists and bankers.

Now, 40 years on, he is back
again, bringing us his book leaving us a bittersweet taste of “auld lang syne” (Stuart will get my
reference here) from the good old days, back when we were all a lot younger.
The rest is just the filthiness that Stuart had to endure: beatings, torture,
interrogation and imprisonment. Typical of those times and of the ignominy,
nonsensicality and mediocrity into which a people that had fought bravely and
right to the finish for freedom had been thrust.

Maybe a reading of Chesterton’s
story The Man Who Was Thursday holds
the key to the reason why Stuart was arrested the moment he set foot in the
Puerta del Sol. The author himself suggests that spies fall into three
categories: journalists, security service personnel planted inside an organisation
(especially an organisation with such an all-embracing banner as the
red-and-black flag) and those bribed by the police into acting as informers from
within (see pp. 36 et seq).

The book offers an endless parade
of personalities from the time: the old fighters in exile: Salvador Gurruchari,
Laureano Cerrada, Cipriano Mera … The men and women who, to borrow Hans Magnus
Enzensberger’s words, “are neither weary, nor neurotic nor drug-dependent. They
do not complain. They do not curse fate. Their defeats have not made cynics of
them. They know that they made mistakes, but they do not try to wipe out the
memory of them. These elderly men, revolutionaries still, are stronger than all
who came after them”

And the boys from the Puerta del
Sol – Eduardo Blanco and Saturnino Yagüe – pop up too … Further comment
unnecessary. Forenames and surnames suffice. The military judges, the
sentencing, Carabanchel. In Carabanchel we find the ‘ordinary’ prisoners of the
Seventh Gallery, astutely depicted by someone who was just starting to learn so
many new things, and the political prisoners in the Sixth Gallery, with a
sprinkling of not particularly fond references to the inmates belonging to the
PCE (Communist Party of Spain), real personalities such as the counterfeiter
Miguel de Castro who, as Stuart remembers him, was “a prison mentor, a wise
guide versed in the art of the possible”, the comrades from the ‘First of May’
Group, and Luis Andrés Edo, my own beloved comrade and friend.

Half-history and half-reportage,
the book is a supremely interesting read. We find frequent flashes of Stuart’s
British sense of humour inviting us to smile: “In real life, there was never a
cavalry troop around when you needed one”, a reference to the cells of the
Brigada Político-Social; or the fear he feels when they moved him to what was
then the Yeserías Prison Hospital, when he suspects they are going to “trepan
him or subject him to some other sort of sub-Pyrenean psycho-neuro-surgery.” Or
the delicate touch displayed by the kidnappers of Monsignor Ussía in furnishing
him with a Bible, only to discover that, “they were not particularly well-versed
in matters of theology”, it turned out to be a Protestant Bible; or, indeed in
his inspired brief description of Don Pablo, a fascist brute of a prison
officer “he was the A to Z of anal retention.” The passage which I personally
most enjoyed reading, on account of my repeated fond readings of the adventures
of both characters, was the one where he says that “Don Quijote had taken on
the personality of William Brown.”

In short, in my view, there is
another aspect to this book which is not to be sniffed at: its verfremdungeffekt, that distancing,
elegant gift for recounting events, no matter how dramatic, as if he were not
involved, as if they were happening to someone else. As Carlos Fonseca has
stated in his Foreword, which is spot-on and as clear as water, “Go ahead and
read”.

Cyril Connolly (1903-74) was a prominent British writer, editor, well known in particular for his book reviews. His biographer Jeremy Lewis described him as “Precociously brilliant in his youth, haunted for the rest of his life by a sense of failure and a romantic yearning to recover a lost Eden.” He was a schoolmate, from their earliest days, and friend of George Orwell, of whom he remarked: “He reduced everything to politics; he was also unalterably of the Left. His line may have been unpopular or unfashionable, but he followed it unhesitatingly; in fact it was an obsession. He could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.” Connolly himself is famous for his dictum addressed to would-be literary types: “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” And reviewing for Harold Evans’s Sunday Times Miguel Garcia’s book Franco’s Prisoner (1972), his comradely words for the veterans, alive and fallen, of thirty years of anarchist resistance to fascism in Spain far surpassed in commitment any of the liberalistic phrase-mongering appearing in what passed for the mainstream anarchist press in Britain at the time.

THE FIRST THING ONE NOTICES ABOUT GOING TO BARCELONA is the peculiar meaningful handshakes of one’s friends. Accompanied though they are by some such phrase as “I wish I were going too,” one cannot avoid detecting in the farewell a moment of undertaker heartiness, of mortuary appraisal. In the early morning among the lagoons, the brown landscape and rainy sky of Languedoc, one begins to share it, only at the Spanish frontier does it completely disappear. As a rule, the change from Cerberé to Port Bou is one from gaiety and comfort to gloom and emptiness; to-day it is the Spanish end which is alive. The first thing one notices is the posters, extremely competent propaganda, of which that of a peasant’s rope-soled foot descending on a cracked swastika in a cobbled street is the most dramatic. The frontier is guarded by cultivated German and Italian anti-Fascists, and one begins at once those discussions on political ideology, which are such a feature of present-day republican Spain. “You journalists are the worst enemies of a revolution,” explained the Italian, “you all come here with letters like yours; then you go back and write Right-wing propaganda about us.” “Why can’t you admit that England is not prepared to help any democracy until its rearmament is carried out, when it will be too late?” said the other. Down in the little harbour the militiamen, in their blue uniforms and forage caps, were fishing with bits of starfish. The sombre Spanish train had been painted all along the carriages with crude pictures of troops departing and with harvests being gathered. As it drew out into the autumn sunshine one first became conscious of the extraordinary mixture of patriotic war-fever and revolutionary faith, and of that absolutely new and all-pervading sense of moral elevation which since the revolution is the most dominating note in Catalonia. For here one never says “since the military rebellion,” “since the Fascist revolt,” but simply “since the Revolution” or “since the 19th of July.” At the end of the train were two carriages of Anarchist troops, mostly under twenty, who waved their black and red banners, pointed their rifles at one, and in return for some cigarettes burst into a shout which was taken up all down the train of “Viva la Revolución.”

The following extract is from F.M’s notes on a conversation with the then Solidaridad Obrera editor (1917-1919) Ángel Pestaña: “‘Our information on the German special services, has been good —was good, I should say. Until last week a French compañera by the name of Marthe Richard French —or Marthe Regnier —was Von Krohn’s [Lieutenant Commander Hans von Krohn, German naval attaché in Madrid] mistress, and for a spymaster, Von Krohn was remarkably indiscreet, especially where Marthe was concerned.

“‘Marthe Richard’s story was extraordinary. As a child, Marthe ran away from her home in Lorraine to Paris where she was soon caught and taken back to her parents, and placed in a convent — from which she promptly escaped again and returned to Paris where, in 1900, she fell in with Alexandre Marius Jacob, a French anarchist burglar and his partner Rose Roux, who took it upon themselves to befriend and look after the rebel twelve-year old girl. This time she wasn’t caught, or perhaps even looked for. Unfortunately, in 1905 Jacob, Rose and most of the members of his gang were betrayed and arrested for a string of spectacular burglaries the length and breadth of France, and were sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, leaving the sixteen year old Marthe to fend for herself. For a time she turned to prostitution, but then by chance she met and fell in love with — and married — an extremely rich patron who indulged her every whim.

“… Central to the Hiéron du Val d’Or’s arcane beliefs [and those of Joan Miró i Trepat]and esoteric rituals was an obsession with Eucharistic symbolism, geometry and sacred architecture. It was nonsense, of course, but the importance of this organisation lay in its political inﬂuence, and its obsession with preventing the catastrophic happenings prophesied by ‘Our Lady of Fatima’ and what it euphemistically called ‘returning Europe to the original nobility of purpose and spiritual primacy of a Catholic Christianity modelled on the old Holy Roman Empire’.

“The thrust of the Hiéron du Val d’Or’s seminars and conferences wasn’t simply to dissect and counter Masonic, Bolshevik, Liberal or anarchist subversion and ‘contain’ the advance of Godless communism and ‘Masonic free thought’, but to actually confront the enemy by launching a four hundred year rollback, It was what they euphemistically called ‘expanding Catholic values’, ‘mobilising true faith into action’, and ‘spreading the social reign of Christ’.

“Joan Miró i Trepat, the patron of pistoleros and president of Pavimientos y Construcciones S.A., one of the country’s biggest building ﬁrms, was the wealthiest, most inﬂuential and reactionary of Catalonia’s employers. Tall and distinguished looking with his wide brimmed Panama and his gold fob watch with its heavy chain which hung in an arc between the two pockets of his mustard­ coloured waistcoat, Miró i Treat’s trademark accoutrements were a small gold Sacred Heart of Jesus pin on his jacket lapel, a silver­ handled walking stick in one hand, and a Romeo y Juliet cigar in the other.

“He was also a man fired by a sense of mission, an almost hysterical obsession to restore to Spain and Europe the spiritual and temporal hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church — and in light of Germany’s defeat, the fragmentation of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the likelihood of apocalyptic terror and world revolution, that mission was now urgent. A hard-line, paranoid integrist who clung, barnacle­-like, to the Tridentine traditions of Holy Mother Church, his life and enormous fortune were dedicated to advancing the cause of Rome. In his worldview, the Church—in its perfect sixteenth century manifestation — was the only institution of spiritual and temporal power by which the unity and glory of Europe could be restored to what it had been during Charlemagne’s Reich, the Holy Roman Empire.

Donate

Basket

Anarchism

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary